Champlain College: Vermont's new bastion of 'AI'

'Appreciative Inquiry' the hallmark of Champlain's new business school

Dec. 6, 2012

A scene from an Appreciative Inquiry summit conducted by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. The focus is on opportunity and building on successes, not on problems. At the microphone is employee Bruce Tichenor. / Courtesy photo

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Free Press Staff Writer

Photo by Jean Luc Dushime

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When Champlain College announced this fall that it was establishing a new business school, the college made clear that this would be a business school with a particular focus.

The focus is “strength-based management practices,” and specifically, “Appreciative Inquiry” — a method of organizational development that is favored by the school’s major donor and namesake, Robert Stiller, and by Champlain College itself.

Strength-based practices use positive psychology to build on an organization’s strong points, and Appreciative Inquiry, a variant with its own methodology, seeks to identify what works well and then to spread it throughout the organization.

Stiller, who founded Green Mountain Coffee Roasters in 1981 and retired as CEO in 2007, introduced Appreciative Inquiry to the company about 10 years ago. He believes it contributed substantially to the workplace “culture” that has led to the company’s success.

Champlain College, for its part, convened about 400 people for a two-day Appreciative Inquiry summit in August 2011. Among the goals was to envision an educational model at the college that would contribute to the state’s economic vitality.

“It was very powerful,” Champlain President David Finney said of the experience. “People really felt energized.” He said the college is still processing the summit’s findings, some of which have been incorporated in the latest version of the institution’s strategic plan.

The college was already invested in the Appreciative Inquiry approach when it announced in October that Appreciative Inquiry, known to its adherents as “AI,” would be a key part of the new business school’s curriculum and community outreach. Champlain’s Division of Business, serving residential undergraduates and distance-learning master’s students, was renamed the Robert P. Stiller School of Business in recognition of what Finney called a “transformational” $10 million gift from Stiller.

Of that donation, $4 million was earmarked for capital improvements at the college and $6 million for the business school itself, including $4 million for two endowed chairs for faculty “with expertise in positive psychology management theory and practice such as Appreciative Inquiry”; and $2 million for an endowed fund “to produce Appreciative Inquiry programs and training for Vermont and regional companies and organizations.”

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In other words, the college plans to help instill the Appreciative Inquiry way of thinking not just in its students, but in any Vermont company that proves receptive.

In a joint interview with Finney last week, Stiller was asked if he believes the Appreciative Inquiry model is something many companies could benefit from and is therefore worth propagating.

“Absolutely,” he said, adding that research over the last 10-15 years has confirmed the effectiveness of positive psychology. “It works.”

Asked if Appreciative Inquiry is a reputable, respectable academic field, Finney replied that it is.

“This is rigorous stuff,” he said.

Searching for the best

On a superficial level, Appreciative Inquiry summits as they’re described seem reminiscent of various self-improvement brands that gained popularity over the last few decades: large groups of people going through sequences of prescribed activities and emerging, after a day or two, with uplifted spirits.

Stiller contends that descriptions are inadequate to convey what happens at these sessions: You have to experience it yourself.

“You can read about it, but till you see it yourself, you don’t know what it’s like,” Stiller said. He added: “Unless you’re there, you aren’t going to understand it. It’s a fact.”

Written treatments can be somewhat opaque. Here’s part of a summary Champlain College put out for its summit participants in answer to the question, “What is Appreciative Inquiry?”

“Appreciative Inquiry is about the co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives ‘life’ to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the ‘unconditional positive question’ often involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. ...”

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This comes from a paper co-written by David L. Cooperrider, a professor at Case Western University and a principal exponent of Appreciative Inquiry.

Generally, Appreciative Inquiry differs from conventional strategic approaches that focus on organizational problems or shortcomings and how to solve them. Appreciative Inquiry, instead, zeroes in on what’s most effective, or successful, and seeks to spread those practices to other parts of the organization.

A key part of the methodology is the summit, which convenes people from throughout the organization, which commonly spans two days, and which encompasses four phases known as “the four D’s” — discovery, dream, design, and destiny (or deliver). In the discovery phase, participants interview one another about their signal workplace successes, or high points. They’re then encouraged to use their findings to envision and affirmatively transform the organization.

Stiller recalled the first summit at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which brought together nearly 200 people from assorted constituencies — suppliers, coffee farmers, customers, stockholders, and a cross-section of employees.

At the outset, he said of the employees, “A lot of them were like, ‘Why am I coming? I’m not going to say anything, they’re going to fire me.’ And when they started engaging in these discussions, they really got motivated.” And when it came time for participants to pitch their ideas to the full room, he recalled, “there was a line of about 25 people waiting to go up who had never spoken before. ...”

“So, the energy it creates you just have to experience. You can read about the process and say, ‘I understand this, I understand that,’ but to see firsthand the energy it creates, it’s spectacular.”

Finney had a similar reaction to the college’s summit.

“I had at least 50 people tell me they’d never been to anything like this, where we pulled together so many constituencies,” he said. The challenge for the college, he said, had been to “hold on to the jetstream of energy that came out of it.”

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The summit is just one methodology within Appreciative Inquiry, said Lindsey Godwin, associate professor of management at Champlain, who did her doctoral work at Case under Cooperrider. She listed several other forms: Appreciative Coaching, Appreciative Leadership and Appreciative Teambuilding. Case maintains an informative website on the field called AI Commons.

Vermont experience

Appreciative Inquiry is not widely known, or used, in Vermont. Stiller wasn’t aware of any other private companies here that have employed the methodology.

At least two state agencies have run Appreciative Inquiry summits, and both sessions got positive reviews from the top managers.

Craig Whipple, director of the state Parks Department, said he still uses a vision statement that was developed at a parks division summit about five years ago. He said it was the sort of meeting that generated “a very positive, uplifting discussion that gets you where you need to be. There’s no room for whining.”

Tom Torti participated in an employee summit when he led Buildings and General Services, in the late ’90s. He called the session “incredibly effective,” and recalled that the department wound up with “great customer service results,” as well as being the “department of choice” in state government “where everyone wanted to work.”

Both sessions were led by Anne Peyton, a South Strafford consultant who is trained in Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search, Balanced Scorecard and other techniques.

She summed up the key to Appreciative Inquiry as, “find something that’s working well and apply it elsewhere.”

At Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, according to Sandy Yusen, director of public relations, Stiller’s introduction of Appreciative Inquiry “was a great fit with our DNA of engaging employees to contribute to the organization at any level.”

Pru Sullivan, director of continuous learning and organizational effectiveness, said the method is used in various ways and infuses organizational thinking. She said one of the early summits led to a statement of purpose and principles that captures why many people want to work at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

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The company’s performance management system asks employees to look at their successes of the last year, to identify the “root causes” of those successes, and to think about how to leverage those successes in the next year. Project teams go through a comparable exercise.

The process doesn’t ignore failures, but addresses them in a distinct way. “We don’t use the word ‘problem,’” Sullivan said. Instead, they talk about an “opportunity” to use identified strengths “to change the dial.” Instead of a “breakdown,” there is the “opportunity of a breakthrough.”

Infused by this affirmative-tinged culture, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters grew substantially over the last decade — from about 350 employees at the time of the first summit to about 5,500 today.

“You need to have the employees thinking how to do better and wanting to do better and being excited coming to work,” Stiller said. “Our culture is phenomenal. Can you be successful without it? Yeah. But I think it played a very significant role in who we are.”

“When Bob says culture is key, that’s really important,” Finney said. “When you walk into work, how do you feel about it? If you feel like you’re part of the future, part of the solution, that is much more engaging than somebody walking into work feeling like, ‘I wonder what I’m going to be told to do today?’ I think that’s really the secret sauce of AI. It sets up patterns of communication and gets people forward-oriented and thinking about possibility. If you have an organization thinking about possibility, it’s going to be a better place.”

Asked if he thinks most firms would benefit from this approach, Stiller replied:

“My feeling is that yes, every company would benefit from including all the employees in what the company is trying to achieve, because the more people you have involved in something, the more creative the solution. Now, it gets difficult to organize when you have a lot of people, but if you can structure that and get them engaged, they’re going to be much more committed to the program or the strategy you’re pursuing because they became part of it.”

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The Appreciative Inquiry method, he said, can be applied in many contexts.

“If you’re going with your family on vacation,” he said, “well, one of the first processes is to discover what works, so you would ask your kids, ‘When have we had the best vacation? When have we really had fun?’ Why did we have fun? If it were better, what would it look like?”

Stiller conceded that Appreciative Inquiry is not every CEO’s cup of tea.

“Now, there’s a lot of organizations out there that don’t want to hear any of this,” Stiller said. “There’s leaders that, you know, ‘I don’t have time for that, I know what’s best, I gotta get people just doing as I say,’ and there’s almost an adversarial relation with the employees, you know, ‘Employees are our biggest expense, so how can we give them as little as possible and have them work as hard?’ That is becoming old school today.”

“It doesn’t work,” Finney said.

Appreciative Inquiry appealed to him in part, he said, because Godwin, an in-house expert, is “an extraordinary teacher”; and because he believes from his administrative experience that “the functionality of any organization is enhanced if everybody believes that their voice is going to be heard.”